


From Cutler

by LaughingMcNugget



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 15:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6663805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaughingMcNugget/pseuds/LaughingMcNugget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dreams haunt the Paladin as he travels the wastes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Cutler

“Cutler, don’t make me do this!” Danse had his rifle jabbed against the crook of his brother’s jaw.

  
Yellow eyes looked back at him, bloodshot and bulging, sinister yellow eyes that mirrored the faint glow of the flaming refuse in the mutant den. Cutler’s split skin oozed green goo and thick, diseased blood as his lungs expanded, tearing ragged ruts down his torso as the air stretched his too taught skin. Blood dripped down the Knight’s face, and Danse had to fight to urge to wipe it away, lest he give the mutant an attack of opportunity.

  
“Be my brother, be _strong_. Be with _me_ again. Will not hurt long.” The beast sounded so unlike Cutler, the oddly high voice belonging to a rough, scrappy man now deep and craggy, echoing in the chasms of the nest.

  
Danse closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The shot rang out, and Cutler screamed. The Knight found himself thrown across the room, as the shot blazed a hole in the rocky over crop. Tears stung his eyes, and the long gash down his cheek and up to his forehead ached with the furrowing of his brows. He had to look, he had to aim, hideous green flesh in his sights and he could not afford to be spared the sight of-

  
He pulled the trigger, and felt his heart rip to shreds in the same way his bolt tore through his brother’s skull. Cutler’s body laid in a heap; green, oozy, disgusting and shameful. Unbefitting a fallen soldier. Danse wished in spite of himself that he could sit next to the carcass and regale useless details about useless afternoons in Rivet City, or how pretty Initiate Lucia was. Or just anything, like they used to. Just to have Cutler back. Righteous Authority fell to the filthy ground, and Danse knew he would have to pick gore from her grates, but little mattered beyond the core command that drew the Vertibird signal grenade from his belt pouch. Danse felt his heart drop once more, and the shame of a failed mission made him queasy. He would be reprimanded, demoted, maybe even made to scrape rust from the outside of the Prydwen’s hull; but he would do so knowing that his brother was not out there suffering. Or worse, causing suffering himself. Now the mutant lay dead, and Danse stood, the grenade fuming a tall cloud into the open sky, and he felt just as dead as the green, greying body.

  
“ _Traitor_! How could you _kill_ me! You were by brother!” Cutler’s voice cut through him, the whisper blowing out the grenade, the flames, and the stars alike.

  
Absolute darkness overtook the nest as the Knight scrambled to find his tossed aside rifle. It was lost to the darkness. The ground fell out beneath him, and he struggled to churn his legs and find something stable, anything stable to latch onto and pull himself against.

  
“ _Traitor_!” Cutler’s voice echoed from the void.  
The Knight rammed into the cold body of his former brother, stumbling over the rigor mortis stiffened limbs and sprawling into the dirt.

Danse crawled forward and ended up face to face with the stony yellow eyes of the body. More blood invaded his vision as his heart raced, pumping painfully in his chest and spilling itself across his eye. He twisted to the side to find the same glazed over stare boring into his skull, creeping figures like puppets circling him with the shape of his dead friend. Danse nearly vomited, the blown out skulls bobbed to and fro to music that he couldn’t hear, stiff bodies shaking like plastic toys in the darkness that surrounded him. Cutler. _All Cutler_.

  
“ _Murderer_!” the dead bodies of his brother were kicking him, rolling the Knight in the dirt and screaming his name.

  
Then the bodies shifted back, as though startled. A short, thickly built person was dropped by one of Cutler’s manifestations, red hair slick with blood and FEV serum. The tiny body flipped as it was skipped across the floor like a stone. It landed just in front of the Knight, and honey gold eyes stared up at him, sickly yellow invading the soft hues. At once, the woman’s face split into the manic grin of a mutant, her cheeks tearing open as she spoke “ _Abandoner_!”

  
She rose as though she were picked up by an invisible rope around her neck, and the grin that split her face oozed slightly as she chanted his name.

  
“Nicole! Cutler what have you done to her!?”   
The body of his partner swung much like a lynched corpse, floating slowly and circling him, her hair no longer slick with FEV, but thin and wispy.

  
“K-killer.” now her voice was a croak, her skin splitting all over her body, her eyes fading to black and clothes hanging loosely on her skeletal frame. The words faded into a growl, squelchy and unintelligible.

  
Knight Danse could only watch as the mutants circled him from afar, and the thin, hairless body of his new partner dangled in empty space. Her nose, much like her lips, fell from her body in a trail of dust. Long, filthy nails took place of her fingers and her jaw fell open wide. She dropped, onto the same black plane he had been thrown onto, and her unblinking, depthless black eyes locked onto him. She charged forward with the gurgling groan of a feral, and Danse felt the sting of her jaws around his throat.  
Danse woke up nearly vibrating from the rigidness along his spine, an arm coiled around his Knight’s waist. At some point during his dream she had sat up and halfway scooted him into her lap to comfort him. Her voice was soft against the still fresh cries of the mutant and the ghoul rattling in his skull “Paladin?”

  
Her mechanical hand just barely sifted through his hair, careful not to tangle it in her joints. A huff left his lips, and the Paladin pressed his forehead against her chest, swallowing a sob that shook his shoulders.   
“Was it Cutler again?”

  
The answer was the feeling of tears soaking through her uniform, and her CO shuttering in his attempts to stay quiet. He sat up suddenly, hands on her shoulders and eyes wide and searching across her face. She stared back; bottle red hair tied back in a band, and honey gold eyes wide and startled. Normal. She looked normal. Tired, but normal, and Danse felt relief slow the pace of his heart. Her prosthetic had fallen to his shoulder, and the rubber grips were tight on his skin “Say something.”

  
The Paladin leaned forward to rest the crest of her hair against his, eyes downcast as though he were praying “It was Cutler, and then-“

  
Nicole pulled him into a hug, awkwardly leaning over his legs to rest her chin on his shoulder “I have you, what happened?”

  
Danse, in spite of decorum and all his conditioning from Krieg, reached around her waist and drew her into his lap “I saw your body. You were dead at my feet and I couldn’t do a damn thing to save you.”

  
He rocked slightly, as though he were a child hugging his favorite stuffed animal after a bad dream “I can’t loose another friend like you.”

  
A more sober version of himself would have reprimanded how his hands smoothed over the curve of her spine, but the feeling under his fingers was enough to rend the images from his mind. Whole, thickly built, honey-eyed Nicole was in his arms, and she had chased off yet another nightmare.

  
She pushed back enough to look him in the eye, their noses almost brushing “I wasn’t planning on leaving you. Or dying. And you-“ a laugh was on her lips, and the sound was comforting “-had too much to drink before you went to sleep. That must be what gave you bad dreams.”

  
It made sense, when Danse took a look back at his reaction and the situation. Her in his lap and draped in his arms as though she’d been there as thousand times before. Him buzzed into a hyper emotional state and lost to his right mind. After all it was only a dream. She was safe. A momentary urge to stuff his face against her neck was forced down before it caused a physical reaction.

  
“You should get some sleep, Paladin.” She scooted off his lap, off his bedroll, and crawled the foot and a half over to her own roll “Are you going to be okay?”

  
“I’d feel better if you-“ Danse clamped his mouth shut, a flicker of guilt burning in his chest; he couldn’t ask her to sleep closer even if he’d been crying not ten minutes earlier “-never mind.”

  
Nicole dragged her roll up beside his, and started to settle herself down to sleep “What did you want?”

  
A quick shift had the Paladin on his back and already comfortable. The Knight turned to face him, and her organic hand came to rest on his shoulder reassuringly “I’ve got you, don’t worry.”

  
“I won’t.”

  
Danse fell asleep with the sound of the Knight’s steady breathing and the quiet whirring of her mechanical arm.

  
Cutler, sandy hair and wind-burnt skin, gazed over the surrounding area of D.C., a crisp breeze making his bomber jacket sway slightly. Beside him, Knight Spencer stood silently, gazing over the cliff’s edge to survey an area she had never seen before. The man shucked off his jacket, and draped it over her shoulders, blue eyes fixated on her brown as she placed one hand across his jaw. Next came his weapon, a rifle named Divinity, and he threw it over the edge only for it to vanish into wisps of smoke midair. Without ever breaking eye contact, Cutler eased the orange Brotherhood jumpsuit he wore off his shoulders. The outfit seemed to ebb around him like sunset tinted smoke until the man had the suit folded and tossed it off the cliffside as he did with his weapon. It split midair, and transformed into orange moths that scattered about in the breeze. Then he turned from her, blue eyes fixated on the horizon.

  
“He’s your problem now, sorry that he’s a bit broken.” came Cutler’s playful voice, light and airy as though he were only sighing the words.

  
Nicole shook her head slowly, a calm smile across her face “As if he would ever let you go completely.”

  
Danse sighed somewhere in his mind’s eye, the Knight got along with his old partner just as well as he had dreamed they would. He would have loved for them to meet.

  
Cutler threw his head back and laughed in the warm, jovial tone Danse missed so much “You will keep him young for me, won’t you? Won’t let him work himself to death?” he turned, and Danse felt those blue eyes bore into him “And you, stop blaming yourself. You know I love you until time itself ends, brother. I’m better off for what you did. Mutant life… that’s no life I wanted to live. Thank you for setting me free.”

  
With that Cutler turned his gaze back to the cliff’s edge “Give this lovely lady a kiss for me, huh brother?”

  
He leapt, body seeming to catch alight in mid air, and every particle of him spiraling outwards like fireworks. Explosions in blue and yellow and bright, clean white lit up the darkening sky. Then at an instant it was over, the sun had set and now only Danse was left in the plane of his mind.

  
“ _I’m free_!” it was an echo into the sounds of the night.

  
The Paladin awoke to something brushing across his shoulder, and he went to raise a hand to brush over it. However, his arms were wrapped around his Knight, and she smiled warily at him when he twitched to feel his fingertips on her back. She brushed his arm again, mechanical workings in her prosthetic flaring warm from the burning question roiling in her gut “Danse I just had the strangest dream. Was Cutl-“

  
Danse lurched forward, hands untangling from her waist to seize her jaw in just the same spot he’d jabbed his last partner. Hesitation, only for a moment, then surrender. He pulled her to him squarely, softly, holding only for a second before pulling back and discretely licking clean the thin line of spit she left on his lips.

  
“That was from Cutler.”

 


End file.
